Battle for the bay

Channel deepening inflames community passions like few other issues. This week, opponents of bay dredging head to the Federal Court. Peter Wilmoth meets the man leading the fight.

FOR someone with the biggest battle of his life in front of him, it's useful that Michael Morehead isn't scared of backing himself in a fight. This time, the fight involves protecting the interests of concerned community groups and businesses around Port Phillip Bay in the days before channel deepening — one of the most contentious political and environmental debates of the day.

Back in 1985, a skirmish had a more immediate conclusion. Morehead, then a 24-year-old former junior surf champion, had just awarded prizes to the winners of a wet T-shirt competition the Tasmania University Surf Club had organised near Hobart. He was heading to the bar for a drink when, unprovoked, one of the "non-surfer" elements shoved him in the back. As Morehead turned around, the man pushed a broken glass into his eye. "I was livid," he remembers. "I'm not really proud of it but I really did hurt that person. They needed two ambulances that day."

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Twenty-two years later, we are sitting in Morehead's one-man legal practice in Portsea and he's pointing at the scars from the attack. Now a married father of two young children, Morehead's battles are fought in a more formal arena, taking instructions from conservation group Blue Wedges in its battle against federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett's decision just before Christmas to give the go-ahead to channel deepening in Port Phillip Bay.

For thousands of holiday-makers, one of the hottest ecological issues is in front of their eyes. Today, people will sit on the bay's beautiful beaches, or sail across its clean waters, or fish from its piers and from boats without fear of eating a contaminated catch.

Whether the bay becomes a "quarry" or whether dredging is halted — temporarily or permanently — may be decided this week.

The $969 million project plans to rip 23 million cubic tonnes of rock, sand and contaminated silt from the bay's shipping channels to enable a new generation of larger container ships to berth in Melbourne.

Opponents believe the project will devastate the bay, causing soup-like water, possibly contaminating seafood and placing certain fish species such as the Australian grayling under threat, exposing swimmers to toxic substances and destroying the unique sponge gardens that attract divers from around the world.

The Port of Melbourne Corporation concedes that the entrance to Port Phillip Bay will take up to 30 years to recover from the effects of dredging.

The corporation said last month it had put in place the "strictest environmental controls ever" for the dredging, and that "dredging schedules have been designed to minimise impacts on bay assets".

IT'S FROM his modest Portsea office that Morehead is taking on the corporate and political giants. He also represents the interests of 29 small businesses, which he says face losses of $30 million if dredging goes ahead. The businesses include charter vessels for cruising and fishing, vessels taking people to swim with dolphins, the Portsea-based dive industry, and businesses that will be indirectly affected, such as local hotels and golf clubs.

With no clear answer provided by the Port of Melbourne Corporation about whether fishing and recreational charters can proceed when dredging begins, the operators have asked Morehead whether they should be accepting bookings into February and March. "I said, 'Just go for it'. It's doomsday tourism stuff — people want to see it before it's gone," he says.

"The bay is about to become a quarry and the present court action is all that stands in the way of Melbourne's amenity being sold to the highest bidder," Morehead says. "I would like to say to Peter Garrett and John Brumby and to Stephen Bradford (the chief executive of the Port of Melbourne Corporation) — 'You people are about to write a cheque that Port Phillip Bay cannot cash'. It could bounce well before their political careers are over."

Morehead says even if it were lawfully approved, the project would not succeed in the long term. "It's probably going to stop itself through environmental catastrophe. The dredge could rip open sewer trunk or gas lines … The toxic waste that they're taking from the Yarra floor may disseminate in situ and Melbourne's smell change from bearable to unliveable. I'm not going to make any comment about the value of property around Docklands because I'm not a valuer."

It is missing the point, Morehead says, to use the promise of money to assuage fears about environmental damage (one of the State Government's conditions for the project to proceed is that the Port of Melbourne must provide the state with a $100-million environmental bond before dredging begins). "It's all very well to say we'll put aside $100 million for a bond," Morehead says, "but environmental damage is not measured in money; it's measured in amenity over generations."

While he says the Port of Melbourne Corporation likes to present dredging as a "fait accompli", the project is still "very much in play".

In the Federal Court on Thursday, Morehead will on behalf of Blue Wedges challenge Garrett's right to make a decision based on the Victorian assessment report, which Planning Minister Justin Madden signed on October 31. He is seeking Garrett's reasons for his decision, which he has not received.

Blue Wedges is seeking orders requiring Garrett to conduct a new independent assessment, saying dredging should not be approved on the basis of an old plan to deepen the channel by just 1.5 to two metres (the 2007 plan is to dredge between four and eight metres).

Dredging is scheduled to start on February 1. The Port of Melbourne Corporation says it needs to give notification to the dredging fleet by January 15. It says it faces fines from $400,000 a week to $1.7 million a week if the dredging fleet is mobilised and cannot begin. Blue Wedges has called on the Port Corporation to release contracts that prove this is the case. According to Morehead, the Port has been saying for five years that dredging was about to begin. "What the Port really wants is a way to bust the stevedore duopoly and a reason to develop a third terminal."

While the issue doesn't seem to have galvanised the broader community in the way the fight over damming Tasmania's Franklin River did in the early 1980s, Morehead says it might be a case of posthumous regret — that it may come when it's too late.

"There are many cities around the world where you just don't go near the harbour and you just don't go near the creek and whatever you do, don't go near the river. If you can't go near the bay no one will care about it any more," he says.

IF IT was someone with courage and life experience they were after in a lawyer, Blue Wedges and Peninsula businesses found their man in Michael Morehead. His career is rich territory for those seeking examples of the work/life balance. To find out why, it's necessary to go back to Hobart in the '70s, when a teenage Morehead was the state's junior surfing champion.

Born in St Kilda in 1961, Morehead grew up in Tasmania a precocious student, completing his final year at school at 16, before finding work as the manager of a surf shop and on the wharves in Hobart.

Drawn to stories of the great waves at Point Nepean (a surfing break known as Quarantine at the Heads, accessible only by boat), at 16 Morehead arrived at Blairgowrie on the Mornington Peninsula for the summer. His plan was to meet local surfing hero Mick Parkinson, and he was lucky straight away.

"I got off the bus at Mick Parkinson's surf shop in Blairgowrie, which is now the fish shop, and asked him how to get to the wave at Quarantine. He said, 'I'm going out there tomorrow, I'll take you'."

Parkinson and young Morehead sailed out to Quarantine. The only other surfers out there were Doug "Claw" Warbrick and Brian Singer, now multimillionaire owners of giant surf company Rip Curl, and legendary Victorian surf star Wayne Lynch. For Morehead, it was a good initiation into a world of adventure and excitement.

Morehead returned to Tasmania to study sociology and anthropology and completed an honours degree in Aboriginal identity. He had been involved in some heated stoushes in Hobart in the mid-'70s, in which rocks were hurled between his surfer mates and a group of Aboriginal kids. So while relations weren't always cordial, Morehead was confused about why Tasmanian kids were taught no Tasmanian Aborigines still lived in the state.

"I was well aware there were Tasmanian Aborigines running around everywhere, but according to everybody, and especially history teachers, they went with Truganini," he says. "That was bizarre."

Fired by the contradiction, he wrote his thesis about the disjunction between the history he learned at school and the reality.

To support himself through university, he found a job at Wrest Point Casino. It was an experience he found demoralising. "There's nothing sadder than working in a casino, watching people at their worst and their most helpless, smoking, drinking and spending the rent or the mortgage or the food money. I ended up getting sacked for helping punters. I wasn't (helping them), but that was the allegation." He didn't fight it. "I was just pleased to get out of there."

With the $6000 he won in compensation for the bashing incident at university, he went to live on Kauai, an outer Hawaiian island, for three months. Later, on Oahu, he hooked up with local surfer Owl Chapman and successfully tested himself in 4½-metre waves at the famed Sunset Beach, the biggest waves he has surfed.

One day, aged 26, he found himself at the legendary Waimea Bay watching immense waves roll in. He was invited to paddle out, but Morehead knew his limitations. "I was with (big wave surfer) Roger Erickson and Owl Chapman. You could not possibly be with two worse people on a 30-foot day at Waimea because they are going to want you to go in there … And I wouldn't."

Heading back to Australia, he took a job at a major law firm in Sydney, specialising in taxation and mergers and acquisitions. It was the end of the '80s boom, and Morehead was living well. "I was the highest-paid graduate that year. I loved it, but I missed the bush."

In 1990 he was approached to become an associate to Sir William Deane at the High Court in Canberra. While Morehead was there, the court worked on some significant cases, most notably the 1992 Mabo claim, the landmark judgement that recognised a form of native title for indigenous Australians.

Morehead was also there when the High Court heard a challenge to the constitutional validity of the legislation that led to the arrest of Ivan Polyukhovich, the Adelaide pensioner charged with nine counts under the War Crimes Amendment Act. Polyukhovich was charged over his alleged involvement in the murder of about 850 Jews in the occupied Ukraine in 1942, and for his alleged murder of a number of other people, including women and children, while collaborating with Germany's "final solution" for the Jews of Europe.

But then Morehead again felt the pull of the ocean. He quit Canberra and headed back to Tasmania. "I chose to go back to Tassie and surf for another 10 years," he says.

Back in Tasmania he found work as a law clerk, a position he took only because he wasn't admitted as a solicitor in his home state. "I took a backward career step."

Morehead moved to a small farm at Marion Bay on Tasmania's south-east coast, where he had good access to surf and also pursued another passion: riding and training horses.

Turning his back on the glory of a high-profile legal career was a lifestyle decision. "I was in my 30s, I'd rather surf," he says. "I felt I'd already reached the pinnacle of my first career anyway."

Thirty years after Mick Parkinson showed him around, Morehead is back on the Mornington Peninsula, and still surfing.

One day he was out at a challenging break called Spooks, not far from Cheviot Beach where Harold Holt is believed to have drowned. Trying to surf "like a 24-year-old not a 44-year-old", Morehead found himself upside down, his board crushed onto him by a wave, his leg "acting like a shock absorber". The leg broke in three places. He managed to paddle to shore and asked the only other surfer in the water to ring a helicopter.

Morehead was flown to Frankston Hospital and spent nine months out of the water recuperating. "It was a blessing," he says. "With a young family I spent all the time with them."

BACK in Portsea, it's a quiet Sunday morning. A trickle of people walk along the Portsea pier licking ice-creams, and some divers pad across Nepean Highway fully kitted out to look at the famous sponge beds. Some say this will be the last summer they'll be able to do that.

Morehead shows me his new acquisition: a 10-foot board for the ancient Hawaiian art of stand-up paddling, which he intends to use in the surf. He spent the day before our meeting trying it out. "Every muscle in my body was aching afterwards," he says. But he's not slowing down. He still paddles out in big swells, and often takes his dinghy out to Quarantine when the waves are good there.

He is one of only a handful of lawyers working independently on the southern Peninsula. It's a long way from the High Court, but Morehead has no regrets. He is sometimes asked why, with his impressive CV, he isn't working at a big city firm or at the bar. He smiles. "One look in my eyes and people will realise I haven't missed out on anything."